Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

It was an expression, he knew in his heart, of confusion.

—

ON THE DAYS when work on the Abendroth went badly, or on the occasional one when he was afraid to face it at all, he would walk down to Nassau Street in the center of town and stroll among the businesses. There was a drugstore there, Brandt’s, that he liked because it reminded him of something that he might have found in Cheboygan. Brandt’s used a pulley to deliver orders through an opening in the wall at the back of the store. When a prescription was ready, a bell sounded, and a black iron basket the size of a bird cage glided out from a hole above the pharmacy counter, carrying a white paper bag that had been stapled closed. The basket paused with each pull of the cable above an aisle that displayed support hose and fold-up walkers and yellowing plastic humidifiers, descending in arm-long increments until it arrived alongside the cash register at the front. At Brandt’s, he saw few patrons from the university. These kinds of places, the dusty old spots on the rear streets of the downtown, were populated by a second phalanx of Princeton citizenry, a population of secretaries and maintenance men and low-level city workers who provided the bulwark for the professors and the professional class that had been appearing here for generations. The professors were all singletons of a sort, men and women like himself, arriving without history or ancestry, making their marks on their fields — or failing to — and then sending their children onward, or moving on themselves. They were outsiders to the drama — Andret found this fact comforting.

One winter day, as he was leaving through the double-glassed atrium of Brandt’s, he held open the door for a woman coming in. She was a member of this second phalanx of citizenry, a secretary or a travel agent or a store clerk, dressed in a brown wool coat and a winter hat, with a dark wool scarf wrapped over her face. Her shoulders were dappled with snow. She stepped in hurriedly. It was as she was stamping her feet and unwrapping the scarf that he recognized her.

Something struck him in his heart.

He couldn’t think of what to say, so he continued out the door into the cold. Outside, he quickly crossed the street, wrapping his own scarf over his face. There was a lunch counter on the other side of the avenue, and he took a seat at the front. The snow was swarming and the windows of Brandt’s were white with fog, but he could still see her. She’d stopped near the register.

It was Helena Pierce.

He leaned forward and wiped the glass. She turned toward him then and rewrapped her scarf. Was it really who he thought it was? He looked closer but still couldn’t decide.

It was the strangest thing: he could have seen her anytime just by walking into the departmental offices; but out here in town he felt disturbed. He wondered if she felt the same way. With his gloved hand he rubbed again at the window.

Then, as though she sensed him all the way from the other side of the street, she stepped toward the door. She took off her hat and pointed her gaze directly across at him. She didn’t lower her eyes.

After a moment, he raised his hand and waved.

She made no response.

When she turned again and moved toward the rear of the store, he realized that, whoever it was, it wasn’t Helena.

Instead of returning to his office, though, he stopped for the afternoon at Clip’s, a dark-paneled pub that catered to cops and road crews. Sitting at the bar with his bourbon, he gazed out at the sidewalk, at all the shoppers and clerks and bookbag-lugging students hurrying through the snow. At five o’clock the crowd thickened, and at the dinner hour it quieted. He stayed there until long after the streetlights had come on. A couple of times in their yellowish glow he thought he saw Helena again, moving toward him across the slushy sidewalk. But each time the figure drew closer, he realized that it was someone else.

—

EACH FACULTY MEETING began with Knudson Hay straightening his tie and neatening the stack of papers in front of him, then noting attendance and reading the agenda. Then, within moments, the proceedings would degenerate into wrangling. Andret’s senior colleagues seemed to disagree over every imaginable issue, from whether the honor code allowed an undergraduate to remove an exam book from the classroom to which drinks would be served at the fall-semester mixer. Each item was approached like an affair of state. Some of the voices were decorous and level while others sounded like curses in a foreign street. At the center of it all, Hay kept his hand on a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order.

There seemed to be no question too small to generate a half hour of steady opposition. Would a third, lower-level calculus course be added? Should there be a bench in every hallway or only in those that ended at a ladies’ restroom? By some kind of self-imposed discipline, the new hires sat in metal folding chairs in the center of the grand room, generally unwilling to speak, while the tenured professors arrayed themselves among the leather armchairs at the perimeter. Obviously there were factions and alliances, but Andret couldn’t parse them. Along with the rest of the new faculty, he sat silently.

Midway through the semester, there was a deliberation about whether to plant an oak tree or a sycamore tree in the mathematics quad, in honor of a recently deceased emeritus chair who had been an accomplished cabinetmaker. The conversation went back and forth among the senior faculty while Knudson Hay took notes at his desk in the center. This was the pattern on most questions, at the conclusion of which the group would generally vote.

Finally Andret could contain himself no longer. “Why not a beech?” he blurted. “There’s no tree as magnificent as a beech.”

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then, to Andret’s surprise, Knudson Hay said, “Well then, a beech it shall be.”

—

IT WAS TRUE: he’d sometimes thought he’d seen her other places, as well. Standing in a group of pedestrians once, under a traffic signal where he’d been waiting for the light; in the parking lot of the dry cleaner’s another afternoon when he was running to his car in the rain; even outside on the front walk of his own building one spring evening, when he opened the windows for the first time after winter and saw a woman walking away from him following a small dog on a leash.

But he couldn’t say with certainty whether any of them had actually been Helena Pierce.

What he felt when he saw her each time, he couldn’t discern. Shame? Disappointment? Longing? He was aware of something attempting to make itself known inside him, but he couldn’t decide what it was.

—

“YOU LOOK NERVOUS,” said a voice behind him. “You have done something wrong?”

Andret turned, laughing falsely. “Is it so obvious?”

“No, is not exactly obvious.”

She was pretty. Short chestnut hair and a tight skirt. Vaguely Eastern features. He’d positioned himself next to the sangria bowl, and now he held the ladle over her glass. It was the first mixer of the new semester.

“Thank you,” she said. “And I see you have chosen strategic place to fish, Professor Andret.” She glanced down as he filled her drink.

“Have I?”

“I would expect no less. Certainly not from man who defeated Kamil Malosz.” She took a sip and frowned. “But why this dirty water you are fishing in?”

Twenty minutes later, he and Olga Petrinova were walking in two different directions across the campus — she insisted on taking her own car. And ten minutes after that they were sitting side by side at a plywood bar upstairs from a defunct auction-house on the outskirts of town. In front of them were two double bourbons, no ice.